Apologies for leaving you hanging after writing about my scary allergic reaction. I’m so sorry.
I did fall asleep eventually that night, though I woke myself several times, coughing and wheezing. That’s nothing new. Just asthma.
It has taken time to bounce back from that reaction, both physically and emotionally. Let’s start with the physical.
I haven’t had any more full-blown allergic reactions since the day after the reaction that I described to you here (and I still don’t know what caused either of them) but my lungs have been a bit ‘twitchy’. Twitchy isn’t the most technical word for what happens, but I can’t think of a better word to describe it.
Let’s go back to basics for a minute or two: asthma has three major components: inflammation, mucus and muscle spasm.
Everyone is familiar with the idea of mucus – it’s the gunky stuff that comes out of the nose of every toddler in existence, leaving sticky snail-trails down their faces and up the length of their sleeves once they’re old enough to wipe. Mucus in the lungs has to be coughed up and out of the lungs, otherwise it can provide a delicious breeding ground for bacteria.
The muscle spasm in the airways is responsible for the dramatic asthma ‘attacks’ that you’ve probably seen on television, and maybe also in real life – the small air passages within the lungs are wrapped in ‘smooth muscle’ (a type of muscle that is not under voluntary control). When the smooth muscle in the lungs contracts, the airways get narrower. In asthma, this muscle can spasm, causing the airways to get very narrow, which makes it very difficult to get air in and out. Most asthmatics will have a blue inhaler, which contains a medication to relax the smooth muscle in the lungs. Relaxing the muscle spasms that are closing off the airways can provide relief incredibly quickly, sometimes stopping the attack as quickly as it started.
Inflammation is the third and most insidious effect of asthma within the lungs. Mucus can be seen, once it’s coughed up, and muscle spasm can be felt, both in the sudden ‘attacks’ and the rapid relief after taking the blue inhaler, but there’s no way of seeing the inflamed, swollen and irritated airways without taking a fibreoptic camera into the lungs, which is more invasive than most people would like.
It’s the inflammation that is responsible for the ‘twitchy’ lungs. If the airways are puffy and inflamed, they are narrower than usual, so even just a small amount of muscle spasm can be enough to significantly reduce the amount of air that can get in and out. Inflamed airways are also filled with the immune cells that can trigger asthma attacks. If these cells are already in the airways in large numbers, the likelihood of a reaction being triggered is much more than if these cells are distributed throughout the body.
This is what I mean by ‘twitchy’ – asthma attacks are set off by the tiniest little triggers – things that would normally just cause a slight feeling of tightness in my lungs can cause a full-blown hospital-admission-worthy attack if my lungs are already on high-alert.
I took a ‘rescue course’ of steroid tablets for a week after the allergic reaction, and my lungs are just starting to feel ‘back to normal’. It takes time to get inflammation under control, and for many asthmatics, it’s not an intermittent thing. I use a steroid inhaler twice a day, every day to keep the inflammation in my lungs under control. I have been using inhaled steroids for twenty years now, and have had two long periods of high-dose oral steroids; five years for the first, and six years for the second. I have a rather love/hate relationship with steroids because they have some rather nasty side-effects, but they have kept me alive.
Physically, then, things are back under control. I don’t know what caused the reactions, but my lungs are getting back to normal. Emotionally, things are less straightforward. I don’t like the feeling of not knowing the cause of the reactions. If I don’t know the cause, I can’t stop any future reactions. I’m keeping my phone with me at all times, along with antihistamines and my epi-pens. My doctors would be thrilled!
Real Life Unlimited 